The High Court has dismissed a Zimbabwean woman’s judicial review challenge to a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing a recommendation that she be recognised as a refugee.
In a judgment delivered on 14 January 2014, Mr Justice Mac Eochaidh held that the Tribunal had acted within the limits of rational decision-making when it rejected the woman’s explanation for waiting nearly six years after arriving in Ireland to apply for asylum. The court did not decide the asylum claim afresh; it reviewed the lawfulness of the Tribunal’s decision.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as P. M., said she feared persecution because of her involvement with Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change. She arrived in Ireland in September 2002 and worked as a child-minder and au pair for a Dublin family. She applied for asylum in July 2008, after the family left Ireland. She said she had felt safe with them and had hoped conditions in Zimbabwe would improve, but that the situation later deteriorated and relatives faced persecution.
The Refugee Applications Commissioner had refused a recommendation of refugee status and found that the claim had no or minimal basis. That meant the Tribunal heard the appeal on the papers rather than orally. In January 2009, the Tribunal affirmed the refusal, finding the applicant not credible and rejecting her claim that later events made her a refugee sur place.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal wrongly treated her delay in claiming asylum as undermining her credibility, and that the statutory rule on delay did not apply because her claim was based on events after she left Zimbabwe. She also challenged the Tribunal’s reliance on her failure to seek asylum while passing through South Africa and France, and its assessment of conditions in Zimbabwe.
The judge concluded that the applicant’s own account placed the core of her claim in alleged political activity and persecution before she left Zimbabwe. The sur place exception to the delay rule therefore did not apply, even though part of her claim concerned later events. The court also found it was not irrational for the Tribunal to consider the failure to seek protection during transit, while noting there is no rule requiring an asylum seeker to claim in the first safe country.
On Zimbabwe, the judge said the Tribunal’s finding had been misunderstood: it had not concluded that state security could protect the applicant from an established fear. Rather, the Tribunal did not accept that she had established a well-founded fear and noted the absence of evidence that the circumstances prompting her departure persisted. The judge acknowledged that the Tribunal may have overstated the position by saying the MDC was in power, but found that did not alter the decision’s meaning.
The court dismissed the judicial review application. It did not grant an order quashing the Tribunal’s decision.